Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is ready for download

The newest beta for Firefox was announced Monday. The biggest new feature is the Private Browsing mode, which for the paranoid is a welcome improvement as it doesn’t keep any traces of your activity on the browser. It has focused on improving on standards compliance. It scored 93/100 on the Acid3 web standards test. For reference Firefox 3.0.4 scored 71/100 and IE 6 a mesealy 12/100. Other improvements are:

New support for web worker threads: allow web developers to use JavaScript in the background to not affect page load times.

The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content.

Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Support for new web technologies such as W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications

From limited testing on my part it does seem a little snappy and it doesn’t eat up nearly as much memory. Get the beta here: Mozilla Developer Center

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About Jeremy Clark

Small town IT worker with interests in all things technological and technical. Biggest interests are in web development especially the WordPress publishing platform and the community supporting it. Currently developing and maintain the free WordPress theme Techozoic. I'm also always available for hire.